Uhlrick_Hetfield_III

Comment history

Wow! A primary opponent that's attacking Roberts from the right? Is this guy really a Doctor, or does he just play one whenever he's committed? With no opposition either way from a Democratic candidate I'm switching parties to vote against this loon in the primary. Whatever candidate we put up for SOS could not be worse than having this guy win a Senate seat.

He's suspended for the rest of the semester "for his safety", goes on "sabbatical" for a year, comes back and retires. Problem solved, no law suit and legislators get their wish and don't slash the university's budget. Everybody gets something.

Many universities have policies regarding hate speech, a category I think most of us would agree this comment falls into. We cannot sacrifice the principle of combating hate speech just because we think it's OK to hate the NRA.

Let's change the topic slightly. Instead of the children of NRA members Huth writes, on a private blog, that he feels the black students are inferior and unable to measure up to the standards expected of white students. Does he have a right to say it? Certainly. Is it "repugnant"? Yes. Is it irrelevant to his job at KU? Not at all.

How can minority students feel comfortable in his class knowing his feelings about them? In fact, how can a student feel comfortable expressing ideas contrary to his/her instructor's strongly held and publicly expressed opinions, regardless the nature of those opinions?

Now let's turn it back to the matter at hand. No matter how you interpret it, there is a great deal of hostility in his tweet towards the NRA and towards the children of NRA members. In Kansas do we really believe that none of his students are either the sons and daughters of NRA members, or even NRA members themselves? How can they feel free to express their ideas to a faculty member who has already been censured for his abusive conduct and who has expressed himself so violently toward their very existence.

KU's policy is flawed. Private blogs still reflect on the writers and if those writers hold teaching positions they potentially reflect on their relationships with their students. Blogging hateful and inappropriate comments, whether they suggest violence, homophobia, sexism, racism, or a bias toward a specific group cannot help but negatively impact the educational mission of the university and they, like any published matter, should be evaluated as part of the faculty member's work product and dealt with accordingly.

If you can die in battle in some third world hellhole pretending to defend our "national interest", you should also have the right to vote, drink, purchase a weapon, or do anything else any other adult can do.

The real problem is that the process is so anti-democratic. From what I've seen the Commission usually gives the Governor candidates that fit in with their particular perspective so I don't think anything is going to change under the new system. After all, Anthony Powell is by far more conservative than Stegall and he was picked by the Commission.

However, from the standpoint of the legitimacy of the selection, having the Senate vet the choice is far preferable from a little d democratic position than having a hand full of lawyers do the job. Does anyone here from any party actually trust a room full of lawyers?

Secondly, now the choice is a direct commentary on the decision-making of the Governor whereas the Commission gives them deniability that the choice really wasn't theirs. The choice of Stegall is the perfect example. It subjected Brownback to far more criticism than when he put the even more conservative Powell on the bench.

And wasn't Lathrop and Gage somehow intertwined on both sides of this deal? There seems to be a lot more here than meets the eye. Maybe we can count on a strong series of Dolph Simons Saturday columns on the behind the scenes shenanigans.

Oh, and it just hit me, Isn't Sutherland's family suing him because he has allegedly been screwing them? This appears to be a pretty sleazy batch just begging for some good investigative journalism.

This is an embarrassing waste of money and provides the legislature with the perfect example of something to point to when they slash our budgets. We can't frivolously throw money around like drunken sailors and then complain when the whip comes down.

In general, there are already way too many highly paid bureaucrats at KU that do nothing useful to the educational mission of the university except have meetings with one another to discuss nonsense that no one else cares about. Weed out some of these duds and lower tuition.